The room held that particular, languid half-darkness that Arabella so valued. The heavy draperies of dark green velvet embroidered with silver thread were drawn almost halfway, admitting only a narrow band of grey, sickly light that fell upon the old oak table piled high with books. In this muted, milky radiance, everything seemed illusory, unreal — as if the room had become an underwater grotto, and Arabella its only prisoner, voluntarily confined here. The walls, papered in pale wallpaper with a silvery pattern, looked damp as the masonry of an old well, and even the fire in the hearth, which I had lit at dawn, could not banish this dampness — the flame merely tossed about in the grate, casting enormous, trembling shadows upon the walls. They made the room seem even more like an underwater kingdom, where its own laws and its own particular time reigned.
On the table by the armchair, covered with a cloth that Arabella herself had embroidered last spring — delicate stems of wildflowers, still awkward but already promising talent — rested a cup of tea. I noticed it instantly, for I had brewed that infusion myself and knew what it looked like when hot — dark amber, almost brown, with a fine light foam — and what it became as it transformed into a dark, bitter liquid fit only to be thrown to the pigs or poured on garden beds to repel slugs. Now it was just that: dark, oily, with a film on its surface that burst into tiny bubbles at the slightest disturbance of the air.
Arabella sat in the deep armchair by the window, her legs tucked beneath her, her knees covered with the blanket I had knitted for her with my own hands three winters ago, when the cold had been especially fierce. The blanket was grey, with a pattern of small cables that I had knitted on long evenings by the kitchen hearth, listening to the wind’s howling in the chimney, mourning something beyond my understanding. I had made it so that she might not know cold, so that there might exist in the world something warm and soft capable of warming her when I was no longer there. I often thought about this: that one day I would pass into eternity, but this blanket would remain, and she would wrap herself in it, reviving my memory. I did not know then that she would have no children — or that she would have them, but not such as I had imagined in my hopefulness — and that this blanket would turn to ashes together with the house, or rot in the bog-slime, as all vain things we leave behind us rot.
In her hands, she gripped a book — The Garden of Lost Shadows, a novel sent by Mrs. Blackwood from Morton with a note tied with silk ribbon. I remembered how Arabella had winced then, as if offered stale food, and had cast the book onto the table by the door, where it had lain for three days under a layer of dust. I had thought then: “Good, no need to poison the mind with foolishness while there is Scripture and the works of philosophers.” But later, evidently, curiosity had prevailed.
For three weeks now, she had not parted with this novel, and I did not know whether to be glad or to grieve. Her mind was lively, sharp, demanding food as a fire demands wood. But I remembered the tales of the Knights of the Round Table and the stories of the saints she had read in her girlhood — there the world was clear, love was rewarded, and suffering was clothed in meaning. In Mrs. Blackwood’s novels, however, everything was different: there people languished without cause, craved the love of those who were alien to them, and faded away in the end, leaving behind nothing but tears.
Now Arabella was reading with a peculiar, almost painful concentration. Her fingers, thin and translucent like all the Greyvuds’, gripped the spine with such ferocity that her knuckles had gone white; it seemed to me that if she squeezed them any harder, she would snap the book in two, like a dry branch. She bent so low over the page that her jet-black locks fell over her cheeks, hiding her face, and I could see only her brow — white, smooth, without wrinkles, which at nineteen years of age are not to be found. And yet it seemed to me that a certain shadow was already appearing on that brow — that same bitter furrow that had scored her mother’s face in the last days of her earthly term.
On the table, beside the cold infusion, rested the plate with the bitten bread — I had not been mistaken; she had not eaten even half — and a small pot of honey, which she had not touched at all. The candles in the silver candlestick were dying, wax streaming down their sides in uneven drops, frozen like tears. In the air reigned the scent of old books — that particular, sweet-bitter aroma of yellowed pages and leather bindings that always accompanied Arabella. To it was mingled the smell of dried roses resting in crystal on her dressing table. They were the remains of a bouquet brought by Mr. Hawthorn last spring; Arabella, to my astonishment, had not discarded them, but had dried them, preserving them in her seclusion. I did not know what this signified: perhaps emptiness, or perhaps that in her detachment there was room for some strange, incomprehensible tenderness.
“My child,” I said, setting the tray on the chest of drawers and approaching her. My voice sounded steady, though everything inside me had tightened with an unclear, leaden foreboding. “You have not touched your tea again. It grew cold an hour ago, or perhaps more. I will make fresh tea as soon as I go down to the kitchen. And your bread is untouched. You must eat, Arabella. You are thin as a reed already, and in autumn, strength is needed. You know the winters in these parts are long. If you do not build up your strength now, by spring you will be languishing with fever, as you did that year you turned ten, and I spent three nights by your bedside, wiping you with a damp cloth and uttering prayers that, surely, did not reach heaven, for they were too weak and full of fear.”
No answer came. Arabella did not even lift her head — only her fingers twitched convulsively on the page. I noticed how her gaze had stopped on a single line. Her eyes, which had previously moved so swiftly and greedily over the paper, devouring each word with predatory passion — now remained motionless. It seemed my charge was not reading the text, but gazing into its very depths, trying to discern what was hidden between the lines. Something left unspoken by the author, or perhaps not written by him at all, but by someone else — invisible and all-knowing.
The room grew so quiet that one could hear the wax guttering in the candlestick — with a barely perceptible hiss. This silence was unkind. It promised no peace, but waited, like a beast before its spring. In this stillness, which had flooded the chambers of Greyvud Hall, I physically felt: Arabella had frozen, turned into a single ear.
Her essence no longer belonged to this room, this armchair, or this novel. My mistress was out there, beyond the window, in the grip of the murk that stubbornly refused to clear.
“Arabella,” I called more loudly, touching her shoulder. My hand was trembling treacherously. My charge noticed it instantly — she always noticed the slightest flaw in my composure, even when she wore a mask of indifference. “What is it, child? You are paler than usual. Are you unwell? Have those attacks of pain returned, the ones that tormented you last year, when the doctor from Morton blamed the stagnant air and your unwillingness to leave these walls?”
She started, like a traveler suddenly returned from beyond. Lifted her head, and I saw her face — marked by that transparent whiteness that was the hereditary brand of the Greyvuds. On her cheekbones burned a feverish flush that boded no good. Her eyes — huge, bottomless, reaching into the very thickness of the earth where ancient roots slumber and primal darkness breathes — were wide open. In their depths was frozen an expression I could not decipher. Not fear, not joy. Something else, which made my chest grow cold. “Lord,” flashed through my thoughts, “is she seeing the same thing her mother saw in her dying hours? Is the decay that consumed the mother from within being passed down to the daughter?”
“Agnes,” she said, and her voice was muffled, as if coming from beneath deep water, from that very well into which I was afraid to look. “Did you not hear it?”
“What was I supposed to hear?” I asked, though in that same moment the truth revealed itself to me.
My hearing, trained over forty years to distinguish every breath of the house, had already caught what had interrupted her reading. What had turned the silence into waiting.
From beyond the window came a sound.
The sound was sharp, metallic, piercing — the kind that makes one cover one’s ears, even though there is no direct threat in it. It was the screech of a sharpening stone against steel. Someone in the yard was honing a scythe or a knife, scraping away the rust and dirt accumulated over weeks of disuse. A rough, alien noise that had nothing in common with the habitual morning hum of Greyvud Hall: the measured thud of the woodcutter’s axe, to which the house had grown accustomed as an old man grows accustomed to the morning ache in his joints; or the creak of the well-sweep, lulling as a lullaby. This sound was different. Too insistent, too… alive. It had burst into the symphony of Greyvud like a false chord, foretelling that soon all the music would go to ruin.
Arabella was already on her feet. I had not seen her cast aside the blanket and cross the room. She moved with that impulsive lightness that had always frightened me — as if she did not walk but glided over the floorboards, woven from the very murk that billowed beyond the windows. She stopped at the window, yanking the heavy drapery aside with a jerk. The light that flooded the room was so sudden after the half-darkness that I involuntarily shut my eyes. And when I opened them again — I saw her back: straight, tense, as she had not been even in her hours of grief for her mother.
My mistress stood, gripping the oak frame with her fingers, and gazed down to where, in the mist, work was being done. I saw her profile — pale, sharp, with a dark lock fallen across her cheek. Her lips were tightly pressed together, and in her eyes blazed something for which I had no name. Not curiosity, not fear. Hunger. That same predatory hunger with which she devoured her books, wishing to absorb all meanings and secrets at once.
“Agnes,” she said, not turning around. Her voice was low, almost a whisper, but that whisper made my heart stop. “Who is that?” she asked.
“The new stable hand,” I answered, trying to lend my voice an everyday quality, as if the appearance of this stranger from the night murk were a mundane matter. “Mr. Greyvud engaged him yesterday. From Morton, I suppose, or some other region. He’s to assist old John — the stables have been neglected, and John’s hands are not what they were, his eyesight clouded. The master decided a helper was needed.”
“A stable hand,” she repeated, and in the word there sounded a different, alien resonance, as if she were tasting it, trying it on for herself, striving to grasp its hidden meaning. “Has he… worked here before?”
“No,” I cut her off. “The night brought him. Mr. Greyvud assigned him a bed in the stable until he proves his worth. Old John grumbles, of course — he always complains when the world order is disturbed. You know his temper. He complained when I rearranged the kitchen utensils, and when your father ordered the lindens trimmed, and when the horses arrived from London. He’ll grumble and accept it. Everyone accepts it.”
Arabella kept her silence. She gazed down, and I noticed how her fingers, resting on the windowsill, were seized by a fine, barely perceptible tremor — one that only my eye, trained over years to study every gesture and every breath of hers, could detect. I drew nearer, stood beside her, and also turned my gaze to the window.
He was there. Below, in the yard, which the mist was reluctantly releasing from its embrace, leaving on the stones wet, shimmering streaks like the trail of a giant, weary snail. He stood at the hitching post, in old John’s usual place, and in his movements there was something that made me freeze. He worked silently, intently, with that frightening, predatory smoothness that did not fit with his gaunt face and the rags still clinging to his flesh. The dirt, it seemed, had sunk into his skin so deeply that it could not be washed away even with icy water from the bucket. He did not fuss, like John, who was always groaning and dropping his tools, cursing his infirmity. He simply did his work. And did it as if his hands possessed their own memory, needing no guidance from mind or eyes.
“He does not look like a stable hand,” said Arabella. In her voice sounded something I had not expected to hear. Not disdain, not surprise — something else. Something she herself, perhaps, dared not name.
“All stable hands look like stable hands,” I cut in, though I knew the falseness of my words. John looked like a stable hand, for his very nature, his hands and gait, proclaimed his calling. But this stranger… he seemed one who had once been clothed in a different essence, and now, having lost everything, merely played the role of a servant. But I could not confess this to Arabella. Could not speak that he had been expelled by the marshes, that he smelled of tar and raw peat, and that in his eyes was frozen something that made one cross oneself and look away. Could not say that Richard had looked at him as if recalling something forgotten, but not wholly expelled.
“Yesterday, a storm raged,” Arabella said — not asking, but stating, as if verifying a truth she already knew. “In such foul weather, one does not travel from Morton. The roads are washed out, the murk so thick that the world disappears three paces away. Who would dare to hire himself out as a stable hand at such an hour of the night?”
“Perhaps he arrived earlier,” my words stuck in my throat, becoming heavy and cumbersome as stones. “Perhaps he waited in the village until the storm abated. Or perhaps Mr. Greyvud brought him from London itself. You know the capital: those hungry for shelter do not look at the sky. When hunger gnaws at your belly, you go in any weather.”
She turned to me, and I saw her face quite close — pale, strained, with that feverish blush that would not die. In her eyes — huge, bottomless — was frozen something I had never seen before. Not fear, not curiosity. Expectancy. The same expectancy with which Richard had looked at the threshold, before drawing back the bolt. The same that, surely, had wandered in her mother’s gaze when, an hour before giving birth, she stared at the murk beyond the window. I remember asking her then: “What do you see, my lady?” And she had answered: “Death. And life. And something else. Something that has no name.”
“Agnes,” she said, and her voice was low, almost a whisper, but in that whisper there was something that made my heart clench. “Do you believe that people come into this world not by chance? That there is One who guides their steps? That every knock at the door is not merely a sound, but a sign?”
“I believe that the Lord guides us,” I answered, feeling the dryness in my mouth hinder my speech, feeling my words become alien. “I believe that everything has its reason and its season. A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak.”
“And a time to love?” she asked, and in the question was something that made me catch my breath. “A time to love, and a time to hate. A time of war, and a time of peace. To everything there is a season, Agnes. To everything there is a season.”
She turned again to the window. Below, in the yard, Damian had finished his task and now hoisted a heavy saddle onto his shoulder — the same saddle old John always dragged with such effort, cursing the Greyvuds and their enormous horses. He did it in a single motion — easily, freely, as if the saddle weighed no more than a down pillow. I noticed the muscles in his back tense beneath the wet rag of his shirt, how they rolled beneath his skin like living knots, how his shoulders straightened as he stood to his full, frightening height. I noticed how Arabella’s fingers, lying on the windowsill, clenched so fiercely that her knuckles whitened. I noticed how she stopped breathing.
“Go, Agnes,” she commanded, not turning around. “I will come down later. I must… I must finish the chapter.”
I closed the book and remained for long minutes in a daze, gazing through the glass at the murk that stubbornly refused to clear.
“A time to love,” pulsed through my consciousness. “A time to love.”
And I prayed to heaven only for this — that this passion might not become for all of us a time to die.
I picked up the tray with the cold infusion. Paused for a moment, gazing at her back — straight, tense, suddenly become alien to me. I wanted to say something weighty, something that might block her way, protect her, shield her from what was to come. But the words would not come. Only a single utterance, ancient as the universe itself, surfaced in my memory — the words of Scripture, which once had seemed to me mere poetic fancy. Now they burned my lips like red-hot iron.
“A time to love,” I whispered, leaving the room. “A time to love, and a time to die.”
She did not answer. Perhaps she did not hear. Perhaps she heard, but chose silence. Or perhaps she knew something hidden from me: that the hour of departure had already come, that it stood upon the threshold and waited for permission to enter, like that stranger the night before.
I descended to the ground floor. Left the tray on the kitchen table. Sat down on the bench by the hearth, gazing at the flame, which was already dying, turning into a host of crimson, pulsing coals. I watched them smolder and thought that in the chambers above, Arabella had closed the secular novel, cast it aside, and placed her hands upon another — a heavy one, bound in dark leather with brass clasps that clinked like the bolts of a dungeon. She opened the book to that very page where it is written of seasons. She drank in the text, and her lips moved soundlessly, echoing the words I knew by heart, but which I had never fully understood.
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Arabella closed the book, laid it on her lap, and remained still, her gaze fixed on the window. The murk beyond the glass did not clear; it stood as a dense white wall, hiding the world, but my charge knew — he was there. He was doing his work in the yard. He had come. And now, nothing could be changed.
I sat in the kitchen, watching the dying flame, and thought that once, in an irrevocable time, I too had been young. I too had languished in expectation of something that would turn the universe upside down. I had waited, but it did not happen. Or it happened, but passed me by. Or I failed to read the sign, because it did not resemble the tales in books. Now I sat here, old, exhausted, with hands that remembered the curve of every spoon and every chipped cup in this house. I realized: the time that had burst in beneath our vaults was not mine. It belonged to her. To Arabella. And I was powerless to stop its flight.
Chapter 3 The GazesOn that day when Damian first looked at Arabella as no servant should look at a mistress, I stood frozen at the kitchen window. I felt it physically: time was breaking. Not stopping — breaking, like a dry branch bent over a knee; I heard that bony crack, foretelling that the past would not return. The minutes dragged on like thick molasses in a harvest year — they caught on one another, stumbled, fell, and in every movement there was something deathlike. It was the stillness of a hunted hare that no longer seeks escape, because it has accepted the inevitability of the end.
Arabella cast aside the book. The heavy thud of the folio against the faded velvet cushions reached the kitchen like a short gunshot. That was the first blow of the hammer erecting the scaffold. I gripped the windowsill so fiercely that my knuckles went white, and waited. I knew: this would happen. I had known it from the second Damian had defiled the threshold with his presence, from when Richard had recognized Fate in him, from when the mist had grown so thick that we had begun to drown in it — slowly and inexorably.
Footsteps on the stairs — quick, stumbling, almost running — cut through the silence of the halls. Arabella had never known haste; she had always glided over the floorboards, like all the Greyvuds, who for centuries had learned not to disturb the dust of their ancestors. Now she was running. I recognized the sound of her steps — barefoot, I realized from the soft, damp slap of a naked heel on the old oak. She flew down the stairs, skipping every second one, like a child drawn to something forbidden. I looked out into the corridor and saw her back — straight, taut as a string. Her light morning dress was thrown on hastily, the top buttons left carelessly open. Her hair, which she always subdued into a tight knot, now fell over her shoulders in a black, predatory cascade, and she did not think of pinning it up.
I wanted to call out to her. My throat rattled with the words: “My child, cast aside this madness, you have forgotten your shawl, the cold will chill you to the bone.” I wanted to cry: “Your dress is unfastened, shameful before the servants, what will Mrs. Blackwood say when she sees my charge so disheveled?” Or the most terrible: “Do not breathe the same air as the one expelled by the marshes, for the marsh exacts its tribute and does not release its own…” But the words lodged in my throat, turning into that same suffocating knot that blocks one’s breath whenever the universe crumbles and you are powerless.
I could only watch as she ran out onto the porch, as she flew down the steps. Her feet in house slippers — satin, sky-blue, over which I had haggled with the merchant at the fair in Morton, fighting for every penny — stepped into the rich, oily black mud of the yard. The fabric grew wet, darkened, absorbing the dirt that would forever eat into its fibers. No cleaning, no caustic lye, with which I had for years removed stains from her clothes, would restore the satin’s former, virginal whiteness.
She did not notice. Or chose to ignore the omen. She walked toward the stable, and I followed with my gaze her tracks — deep, uneven marks of soaked shoes that had lost their shape. I realized: this was that same “time to die” of which Scripture spoke. Before, it had seemed as distant to me as the cold stars in the sky or the bookish love that cannot be found in this sublunary world. Now I understood: yesterday, I had opened the door not merely to a stranger — I had let in Mischief. But the mischief was not in him. It had slumbered in the very walls of Greyvud for centuries, and now it had awakened, stretched its shoulders, breathed in unison with the newcomer. And I was powerless to lull that beast back to sleep.
I saw her reach the stable door. Saw her freeze, as if sensing an invisible barrier. She stopped two steps from the open gap of the door. The light emanating from within fell upon her face — pale, tense, marked by that feverish blush that neither the morning damp nor the icy breath of autumn could extinguish. Within her raged a different fire.
She hesitated, and her hands — thin, translucent, with long fingers that turned the pages of books so gracefully that I sometimes forgot they belonged to a living creature, imagining them as a sculpture of cold marble in the niche of an abandoned temple — now hung limply at her sides. I watched them trembling; watched her fingers clench and unclench convulsively, as if she wished to grasp an invisible thread, but it slipped away from her into the murk.